§1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising, such as online advertising for example. In particular, the present invention concerns improving the utility of advertisements, such as cost per impression advertisements for example, to end users.
§2. Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.). Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant ads. For example, the AdWords advertising system by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. (referred to as “Google”), delivers ads targeted to keywords from search queries. Similarly, content targeted ad delivery systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”), titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and Ser. No. 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”), titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. Content targeted ad delivery systems, such as the AdSense advertising system by Google for example, have been used to serve ads on Web pages.
As can be appreciated from the foregoing, serving ads relevant to concepts of text in a text document and serving ads relevant to keywords in a search query are useful because such ads presumably concern a current user interest. Consequently, such online advertising has become increasingly popular. Moreover, advertising using other targeting techniques, and even untargeted online advertising, has become increasingly popular.
Currently, ads delivered with audio content, such as Internet audio streams (e.g., podcasts or Internet radio stations) for example, are typically based on a “reservation” model. That is, an advertiser reserves a spot in the audio stream for a fixed fee. Unfortunately, however, the reservation model doesn't necessarily maximize revenue for the audio publisher because many advertisers that don't have the resources to negotiate agreements for such ad spots don't compete for those ad spots. Further, from the perspective of the end-user (i.e., the person or persons to whom the audio content is delivered), the ad could be totally irrelevant or not as useful as it could be.
Existing advertising systems, such as systems that insert ads into audio content (e.g., audio streams, or more generally, an “audio document”), could be improved. For example, it would be useful to improve the relevancy of ads served in (or with) an audio document. It would also be useful to improve the value, in terms of potential advertising revenue, of such an audio document. It would be especially useful to improve the value, in terms of potential advertising revenue, of an aggregate of multiple instances of an audio document.